Hindu and Buddhist Worldviews

[Guest guest]

This is a brief, very insightful, beautifully written passage on the

different ways in which Hindu and Buddhist worldviews condition

their adherents to face life's problems. It's from the

novel "Desirable Daughters" (2002) by Bharati Mukherjee, a Bengali

Brahmin (now in her 60's, I think) who has lived in the U.S. and

Canada since her grad-school days. Very good book, by the way, if

you're looking for something different to read:

 

HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM

 

For Hindus, the world is constructed of calamities. The stories are

wondrous, lurid and beautiful, full of shape-changing, gender-

bending, grand-scale slaughter, polymorphous sexuality. Miss a

ritual and a snake will invade your wedding. The gods destroy and

remake the world every four billion years. When the stories are

rendered as paintings, they inspire great flights of fancy and

color. My mother told me hundreds of stories from the puranas and

the Mahabharata – even girls from the upper classes going to English-

language Catholic schools got the classic exposure. In school, we

listened politely at what passed for miracles in the Old and New

Testaments, but in a village setting they would hardly have raised

an eyebrow.

 

In the more austere schools of Buddhism, by contrast, the stories

are plain and every day. "Traveler Po came across a fork in the

road ... Farmer Jiang had three beautiful daughters ... Pears from

Farmer Wu's fields were considered the sweetest in all China."

Japanese and Chinese paintings came to life. They were not the hot,

phosphorescent colors of India, but the cool, black-and-white stick

drawings of winter trees against the winter clouds, white geese

flying across a gray mountain range in the snow. .... All the lures

of the world – beauty, wealth, ambition, desire – are not tests to

be overcome, like the Hindu sadhus, or urges to be suppressed, like

the Christian saints. They are simply aspects of creation to be

ignored.

 

When you are armed with Hindu stories, every earthly tragedy is a

shadow of something greater, from a previous time. Consolation comes

from comparison. One could call it "suck-it-up Hinduism." Modern

calamities, losses, and disappointments that seem inconsolable are

minor indeed compared to the suffering of giants on battlefields in

the immemorial past. We took our comfort, or moral instruction, from

the glory and folly of the gods. Had a hard day at the office? Bad

test scores? Well, at least you didn't get decapitated and have to

go through life with an elephant's head replacement. For the

Buddhists, suffering is not the echo of some far greater terror, but

a continuation of something no different. Something no greater than

the tides, the wilting of flowers, the dying of leaves. Consolation

follows from continuity. The death of your love is no larger than

the problem of Grandmother Shui-Ying, who lost the proper thread to

sew her husband's button. While she looked and looked for the right

color and just the right strength of silk, her husband died of the

cold.

 

**********

 

I'd be interested to hear your opinions on this passage. For what

it's worth, my impression is that her description of Hinduism is

sensitive and accurate and true; but also that Hinduism doesn't

necessarily exclude the approaches she attributes to Buddhism. It is

undeniable that Buddhism is, in many ways, a simplification of

Hinduism. But I think simplification is one of the broad movements

of this Group as well, i which some of the more accomplished

Srividya upasaks among us seem to really be aiming at a

simplification of the Shakta Tantra.

 

aim mAtangyai namaH